European Regions Airline Association (ERA) is a non-profit trade association representing the intra-European aviation industry. Its strength and influence spans more than three decades, since its inception ERA has developed and grown in size and reputation to represent 53 airlines and over 120 service providers including airframe and engine manufacturers, airports, suppliers and service providers from all over Europe.

The Association of European Airlines (AEA) brings together over 30 major airlines representing the voice of the European full service airline sector.

1. Safe Legislation

Some €352 billion of EU public procurement is open to bidders from 15 member countries of the WTO agreement on government procurement (Armenia (Pending), Canada, Hong Kong (China), Iceland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Liechtenstein, Norway, Singapore, Switzerland, Chinese Taipei and the U.S.). The value of U.S. procurement offered to foreign bidders is currently just €178 billion and €27 billion for Japan, whereas only a fraction of the Chinese public procurement market is open to foreign business.

Hiring an EU Funding Consultant requires careful planning. Clients must consider how they will work with the Consultant and other project collaborators to make the most of the time invested in their application for funding. It helps to understand that Funding Consultants cannot do all the work themselves. Clients need to set aside time to discuss their goals, answer technical questions about their work, evaluate suggestions from the Consultant and produce and execute a strategy based on those discussions.

General Tips

There are general aspects of proposal development that you need to consider when writing an EC Proposal for Funding

The EU provides funding for a broad range of projects and programmes covering areas such as regional and urban development, employment and social inclusion, agriculture and rural development, maritime and fisheries policies, research and innovation, humanitarian aid.

Winning EU Funding is an extremely competitive process. While an outstanding project is an absolute must, the skills to sell an idea to the funders and knowledge of the EU policy context are equally important, as well as managing and delivering a project when it has been financed.

Evaluators are experts in charge of evaluating proposals, including ethics review experts. The evaluator provides individual scores and comments for each evaluation criterion that are described in the call documents and work programmes. The evaluators may also be invited to consensus meetings where the awarded scores are discussed and a consensus report is prepared.

Corruption in Ukraine remains endemic – Transparency International ranked Ukraine as the world’s 142nd most corrupt country out of 175 in 2014 – but the tide has started to turn.

Public Tenders

The size of kickbacks is currently at around 15% in 2015. In 2014 two islands of corruption in state procurement remained – that was [state-owned gas producer] Ukrgazvidobuvanie and Ukrainian Railways.

Rent seeking schemes